Open Reality: Meeting the Polycrisis Together With All Beings
Paperback $17.95 | Publication Date: SEPTEMBER 2025 | 978-1961864306 | 6 x 9 | 150 Pages
Only modern humans have imagined ourselves as gods…
And come to the edge of destroying life on earth.
Open Reality speaks to the world behind and beneath our daily collective trauma. It opens practical possibilities for creating a shared, flexible culture that knows the natural world both as family and as a working partner. It invites the reader to a world of possibility. What if industrial civilization isn’t the best that humans can do? What if we weren’t alone in the world, but embedded in a universe of conscious, intentional, powerful beings?
About The Author
Shodo Spring has belonged to the natural world for as long as she can remember. She grew up running half-wild in the fields and woods of northeastern Ohio, with early mornings on the shore of Lake Erie and long days outdoors alone in the woods and creeks. Civilized human society was more difficult. She studied physics hoping to understand the universe, then psychotherapy to understand humans, then Buddhism to free herself, all while voraciously reading in history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, philosophy, and spirituality. She joined a series of political movements, finally focused on environment and environmental justice, what would be called deep ecology.
Along the way Shodo started one of the first battered women’s shelters, worked as a community organizer in inner-city Cleveland, trained to become a psychotherapist, and explored spirituality including Sufism, Dianic witchcraft, and shamanism, practiced nonviolent social change, and finally entered the practice of Zen Buddhism, which unlocked her internal cage. Shodo has two children and four young-adult grandchildren. She has practiced Zen for over forty years and taught for twelve. She still works part time as a psychotherapist.
Shodo’s written work includes Take Up Your Life: Making Spirituality Work in the Real World (Tuttle, 1996), editing Shohaku Okumuras The Mountains and Waters Sutra: A Practitioners Guide to Dogens “Sansuikyo” (Wisdom, 2018), numerous essays in anthologies, and an ongoing monthly blog.
Shodo’s ordination name means “right way” or “true path.” That path integrates activism with spiritual practice and deeply nourishing engagement with the earth. Shodo has participated in long retreats, public sitting meditation as activism, and walking hundreds of miles, including leading the 2013 Compassionate Earth Walk along the planned northern route of the KXL pipeline. Mountains and Waters Alliance expresses her vision of humans working with the beyond-human world to heal and regenerate life on earth. She lives on a small farm which serves as a learning laboratory for growing those relationships, and as a residential community of practice.
Reviews
"This is a book about possibility and hope—so much needed—as we go forward uniting humanity to survive, while learning to live in harmony with ourselves and Nature, our life-supporting environment in a holistic world." —Allan Savory, ecologist and President, Savory Institute & Savory Global
"This brave and important book has found its way into our hands and our hearts just in time. Please read. We need the wisdom of Shodo’s deep practice and insight in the times we are facing. A must read today. "—Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center and the author of many books, including Standing at the Edge, Being with Dying, and The Fruitful Darkness
"Shodo Spring invites us to reshape reality—not by deploying AI and carbon nanofibers, but by nurturing our deep roots in nature and Indigenous wisdom. This book can help us awaken from the nightmare that is modern industrial life; every chapter is a not-so-gentle nudge."—Richard Heinberg, author of Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, The End of Growth, and other books
"This book of beautiful, contemplative reflections offers keen insights into the deep, underlying roots of the convoluted network of crises we face both as individuals and as members of a single global community. The path out of our impasse, out of this overwhelming “polycrisis,” Shodo argues, does not lie in more sophisticated technologies or more finely tuned policies but in a recognition of our kinship with—indeed, our identity with—the totality of life on this planet and the entire ever-unfolding mystery of the cosmos. She proposes not only theoretical principles to guide us, but also practical exercises to literally return us to our senses."—Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi, Buddhist scholar and the author and translator of many books
"Open Reality offers a credible antidote to the despair that deflates our creative powers and disconnects us from each other. It reminds us of who humans are, have been, and can be again, and imagines a respectful loving and working relationship with the other beings who share this earth. "—Kritee Kanko, Climate scientist, Zen Teacher and Cofounder of Boundless in Motion
